Steven Spielberg’s aliens are back, in a film that is, emotionally at least, hardly about outer space at all. If E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a film about humans finding a way to bond with creatures from other planets, Disclosure Day is very much a film about humans learning to bond with each other. It’s a giant, glorious blockbuster with a huge heart: despite its bleak outlook on global self-interest poisoning contemporary politics, it’s deeply embedded with a very Spielbergian hopefulness for human empathy. It also, crucially, has an absolute whopper of a cast doing career-best work. It’s surely time for Emily Blunt’s Oscar now.
Blunt is Margaret Fairchild, a restless Kansas City weather girl who yearns for more. One day, Margaret develops extraordinary gifts. From the hilarious “hailstones shimmy” she does while predicting bad weather on a sunny day, to suddenly, inexplicably speaking Russian and suffering a harrowing panic attack on a train, Blunt moves seamlessly between flawless comedic timing and despair. All as she tries to figure out her new purpose and evade the capture of chief bad guy Noah (Colin Firth), who works alongside the government to cover up decades-old secrets that threaten to blow apart humanity’s understanding of itself.
Emily Blunt as Margaret and Josh O’Connor as Daniel (Photo: Universal Pictures and Amblin En)Margaret is the best kind of action flick heroine: inadvertently brave, self-curious but not all-knowing and, oh thank God for this, funny. There are moments where Blunt mines such merriment from her new, awesome talents that she brings what could have been a slightly ridiculous sci-fi plot (more on this in a bit) right back down to earth. It’s hard to care about plot holes when a character is reading someone’s mind with the endearing mania of a child who’s just ripped open too many Christmas presents.
Margaret jettisons her confused boyfriend Jackson (a pleasantly hapless Wyatt Russell, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell’s son) and links up with Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity whizz and whistle-blower who is being chased by the Wardex corporation, those bad guys determined to prevent the release of military-grade secrets. Daniel is trying to work out whether he can still trust his ex-nun girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson, another actor with a great talent for moving between comedy and terror), whose body is being intermittently inhabited by Noah via an extra-terrestrial stone in an attempt to murder him.
Confused yet? If it sounds like a lot, well, it is. This corporate espionage/alien subplot is actually a total MacGuffin, which is to say that it is devised entirely to move the plot along. The characters care very much about the alien knowledge harboured by Wardex and the sci-fi trauma from Margaret and Daniel’s childhoods, but for the audience all this is strangely irrelevant, and frankly, nonsensical. No spoilers, but surely there were more time-efficient ways for aliens to convey their message to earth? Why did they take such care not to alarm children only to terrify them moments later? And to what end the linguistic wizardry that plays such a central role in Margaret’s journey? There’s a sense that this was a longer film (story by Spielberg, script by his Jurassic Park collaborator David Koepp), truncated for time.
Colin Firth is the chief bad guy (Photo: Niko Tavernise/Universal Studios)Despite this, however, the film has a tremendous sense of fun that overrides its narrative imperfections. Daniel is both the earnest do-gooder and a highly watchable stuntman, hanging off a speeding train, driving through walls to rescue Jane (is there an actor who can do accidental action-man better than O’Connor?). And his mentor, Hugo, another Wardex defector, Colman Domingo has a trustworthy warmth that feels reassuring to keep returning to amidst the chaos. And even if the plot doesn’t always work, the pace does, moving slickly from high-octane car chases to the unhurried tête-à-têtes without which the action would hang limply, like an emperor with no clothes.
This is absolutely a film to go to the movies for: original, confident and boldly entertaining. And, at its core is a powerful tenderness. When all the characters come together, Margaret, Daniel, Hugo, Jane, even evil Noah, Spielberg shows his hand. It’s not quite the connection between Elliott and ET, but it comes close.
In cinemas from 10 June
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